Elements

How Storytelling Can Spur Business Growth

When you have a well-known and fabled story attached to your business, it should be easy to go out and succeed in social media, right?

For the Trapp Family Lodge resort in Stowe, Vermont, the challenge wasn't telling the old story; it was finding a way to connect the past with the present. Ultimately, the von Trapps turned to social media to tell stories of the next generation of family members, and found they could use their stories to help grow their business.

When Johannes von Trapp, the youngest son of Maria in the Sound of Music, started the transition to hand the business over to his son Sam, they turned to my firm to see how we could use online marketing. We noticed two things right away: Sam was starting to implement a lot of changes, and he was telling us stories about these changes every time we saw him.

We realized we had an opportunity but needed to put some structure around the idea of using those stories. We asked ourselves a few key questions:

Granted, there were a lot of changes and stories. But how could we develop a structure and format for capturing the stories from Sam and his sister Kristina (and others), and then write them in a very personalized way?

Once we had the stories, what channels should we use to disseminate them?

How would we monitor the responses the stories elicited?

The challenge for most companies isn't having a lack of stories to share—each has many. They just can't figure out a process for telling them.

For Trapp, we started by...

Conducting weekly interviews. Usually we had a phone call (30 minutes to an hour long) and email follow-ups with various people—resort staff and siblings Sam and Kristina von Trapp. We did interviews for 2-3 weeks.

Writing test stories, with style and tone variations. That led us to a writing style that was personal, direct, and easy to replicate. It "sounded" like what we heard.

Setting up our social channels, including a blog on the site, a Trapp Twitter account, and Facebook fan page.

Using free monitoring services. We didn't want to invest a lot of money in a paid service before we knew its value. We used tools like Social Oomph, BackType, Topify, and Google Alerts to monitor what people said about the Trapp Family Lodge resort.

Focusing on our e-newsletter as our main storytelling vehicle. With it, our stories became easier to write. We could then repurpose them to the blog and promote them on Twitter and Facebook.

Monitoring our email responses, Tweet stream (using CoTweet so that multiple people could tweet under the same account), and Facebook insights.

We had one of our copywriters write the first two stories, then the Trapp Family team took over and followed the style. Remember, the style was an authentic reflection of how Sam and his sister actually talked. We just translated it.

In one of our initial stories, Sam told us about a time when he was gathering sap up on a mountain to make maple syrup, when two owls attacked him. The response to this story was overwhelming. People responded, in email and on social media, as if he had told them the story personally. In another story, Sam's sister Kristina wrote about how she and her kids nursed a highland cow back to health. Again, the response was strong and immediate.